THE ROBERTO POLO COLLECTION. CENTRE FOR MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART OF CASTILE-LA MANCHA

TOLEDO – CUENCA

SIXTH FORM LEVEL: AGES 16–18

LEARNING GUIDE

Paul Manes, The Dark Night (formerly called In the Heat of the Night), 2008, oil on canvas The Roberto Polo Collection. Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art of Castile-La Mancha is a new museum created by the Government of this Autonomous Community to house the artworks that form the first assignment – some 500 works – by the Cuban-American art collector Roberto Polo.

It is one of the few museums in the world created by a government to house a private collection. Inaugurated on 27 March 2019, it is administered by the Roberto Polo Collection Foundation, a public interest entity.

The Collection brings together works by 171 artists, many of whom are notable for being ahead of their time and heralding long in advance the rise of modern art with its revolutions and diverse trends. It begins with 20th-century works that provide clues to what is to come and, through an extraordinary selection of the historical avant-gardes of Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, demonstrates a chapter in the history of art that, up to now, had been little represented in Spanish museums. It ends with a wide-ranging exhibition of work produced by contemporary artists from Europe and the United States. And, mindful of the educational role incumbent on it as a museum, the Collection presents a large number of artists’ names that, though less familiar, are neverthelessfundamentally important.

Museum entrance hall: in the foreground, Woman, a sculpture by Annabelle Hyvrier; in the background, information panels and restored Islamic arches THE CITIES

The two cities in our Community chosen to house the Roberto Polo Collection – Toledo and Cuenca – both of which enjoy UNESCO World Heritage status because of their historical legacy – now boast a modern heritage too. These are two ancient cities in which the impact of the new will create a dialogue with modernity that will have interesting results, and this will be underpinned by temporary exhibitions, publications, and complementary activities to promote the project and its contents as widely as possible.

THE BUILDING

The building that houses the permanent collection in Toledo is the former convent of Santa Fe, which has been declared a National Monument. Constructed between the 9th and 18th centuries, it forms part of the present-day Miradero complex which occupies one of the city’s most strategic positions and is associated with important figures from Spain’s historical past. Building began in the 9th century on a former Visigoth settlement; it later became the residence of the first members of the Arab aristocracy; this caliphal palatine complex went on to form the basis of the palace of the Taifa kingdom of Toledo, acclaimed in numerous accounts by courtiers and travellers of the time for the lavish feasts and celebrations held by the royal family in its splendid rooms and gardens. Originally dating from this period, the unusual Belén Chapel – once an Islamic prayer hall, or qubba – has been preserved; excavations have also uncovered various other remains, and these have now been seamlessly integrated into the new museum, helping us to understand more of the building’s long and complex evolution.

Façade of the CORPO museum showing the sculptural group Battle Figures by Miquel Navarro

After the reconquest of Toledo in the late 11th century, the building became the residence of kings, including Alfonso X (known as the Wise). From the 13th century, various religious orders occupied part of the building; however, its medieval features have been lost due to work carried out from the 15th century onwards. The Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture restored the building between 2000 and 2003; since then, new and important work has been carried out by the Spanish Institute of Historical Patrimony – this includes the restoration and consolidation of the historical remains of the building – thus preserving this extraordinary building that has so much to tell us about the history of Toledo and its people.

ROBERTO POLO

Roberto Polo was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1951. In 1961 he immigrated with his family to the United States where he studied fine art, philosophy and history of art at the American University in Washington, D.C., and at Columbia University, New York. He worked as a gallery director and art investment advisor and built up his own collection while living in international art centres such as New York, Paris and Brussels, amassing works from across four centuries of art – from the 17th to the 21st century.

Portrait of Roberto Polo by Jan Vanriet, 2014, oil on canvas, in the museum entrance

Roberto Polo became known as ‘The Eye’ because of his ability to focus not only on artists already recognised in the history of art but also on more unusual figures, less prominent in the discourse of art but who are now being appreciated by art professionals. As he himself has explained, what distinguishes him is his ability to identify art movements and acquire works of art that were ground-breaking at the time but were then forgotten. Eclectic and both an artist and art historian, Roberto Polo is passionate about fine art, decorative art, music and literature, and about ancient, modern and contemporary art. He is an exceptional figure in terms of his knowledge and his activities and is also a renowned patron of the arts, having gifted works to museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and the Victor Horta Museum in Brussels.

He has received many awards and honours, notably Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic (1988) and the Spanish arts patronage awards Premio Capital Arte al Mecenazgo Internacional (Madrid, 2016) and Premio Fuera de Serie, Personaje del Año, categoría Filantropía (Madrid, 2017).

COLLECTORS AND DONORS

Sometimes, an art collector decides to bequeath, donate or assign artworks for the benefit of a public institution – or even to create one – and in so doing to give something to the whole community. This was how certain outstanding museums – like those founded by Frick, Wallace, Morgan, Stewart Gardner, Gulbenkian, Guggenheim and many others – came into being, all of which, quite rightly, bear the name of their creator. This happened particularly in the United States where, despite the prevailing capitalism, it became traditional to give back to the community some of what had been received from it. It is a tradition that Roberto Polo – the latest in this list of treasure seekers – is keen to continue: it is this that ‘makes one great’, he explains. Polo has impressive models from the past to follow. However, unlike most of them, he has decided not to wait until after his death but to demonstrate this generosity during his lifetime and has begun the process of assigning artworks now, although he still has many years in which to go on enjoying this `family´ of his.

THE COLLECTION

The museum’s permanent Collection, made up of internationally recognised artworks, includes artists who represent the historical avant-gardes of Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, together with a wide selection of pieces by contemporary artists from Europe and the United States. It boasts outstanding names like Kandinsky, El Lissitzky, Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein, Schlemmer, Schwitters, Moholy-Nagy and Max Ernst. But what interests Roberto Polo is creating a museum of modern and contemporary art that is rooted in the past and in history, which traces the evolutionary paths of art, yet also introduces new ideas and draws attention to highly significant artists unfairly passed over, such as the pioneers of abstraction and of various currents of modernity in the Low Countries like Joostens, Donas, Peeters, Flouquet, Servranckx, Maes and Eemans.

Hermann Max Pechstein, Portrait of Charlotte Kaprolat, c. 1909, oil on linen

Visitors to the Polo Collection in Toledo and Cuenca should therefore come prepared to be surprised and challenged by the re-examination of the discourses of modern and contemporary art that the Collection demands. ‘This museum is not going to sing the same song,’ Roberto Polo assures us. ‘This is not another clone museum concerned solely with what’s fashionable, not with artistic value, where visitors already know what they are going to see.’ For Polo, this project is the culmination of a ‘marvellous dream’ to create a museum in the country where his forefathers were born.

1. THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN ART: THE 19TH CENTURY

By way of introduction to modernity, this section of the museum includes a number of relevant artists, most of them French – like Delacroix, Daumier, Degas, Moreau, Gervex and Cross – but also the English painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Hungarian Rippl-Ronai. Alongside paintings of landscapes and figures, the dominant theme reveals Roberto Polo’s interest in scenes of everyday life: genre painting is juxtaposed with the great narratives normally associated with history painting because at this period all themes began to enjoy equal status and this heralded the advent of modern art.

Honoré Daumier, Lawyers Conversing or Two lawyers, 1860s, oil on board

Honoré Daumier became known for the drawings and engravings in which he satirises the French politics and society of the time.

Henri-Edmond Cross adopted pointillism, the technique made famous by Seurat and Signac and one of the principal techniques of Post-Impressionism; he would later cultivate a style that became instrumental in the formation of Fauvism.

View of Gravelines (North), Seen from Grand-Fort-Philippe, pointillist oil painting by Henri- Edmond Cross, c. 1891

Moreau was the most notable exponent of French Symbolism and was famous for the eroticism of his oil paintings and watercolours of mythological and religious scenes and for his enigmatic interpretations of figures from ancient history and myth.

Rossetti, a painter and poet, was a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an artistic movement that idealised the Middle Ages and sought to return to the purity of pre-Renaissance art.

2. MODERN ART AND THE AVANT-GARDES

Modern art was born out of the upheaval caused by the major changes that occurred at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th – the result of advances in technology, science and the study of human behaviour – and from the devastation brought about by the First World War, which marked a dividing line between the two periods. Avant-garde political and aesthetic movements began to emerge, both challenging this moment in history and, at the same time, attempting to adapt to it.

Art Nouveau is a decorative style that spread across Europe and to the United States in the last decade of the 19th century and first decade of the 20th and was employed mainly in architecture and applied arts. In Belgium, a leading exponent, along with Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, was Henry van de Velde, whose work can be found in the Polo Collection; he was the first consciously abstract artist in the history of Western art and the founder of modern design theory.

Georg Kolbe, Henry van de Velde, 1913, bronze, height 55 cm Fauvism – so named because the painters who created it were described as fauves (wild beasts) due to their vivid and aggressive use of colour – flourished in France in the early 20th century. Artists in the Polo Collection such as the Belgian painters Victor Servranckx and Prosper de Troyers had a fauve phase before embracing abstraction.

Victor Servranckx, Untitled, 1921, oil on canvas

Expressionism, which focused on the emotive and subjective and employed distortion and an equally colourful palette, emerged in Germany with the exhibitions of the Die Brücke group (1905), two of whose founders, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erik Heckel, are represented in the Polo Collection, as is another leading member, Hermann Max Pechstein. The Russian artist Vassily Kandinsky, the most notable of the pioneers of abstract art, cultivated this style for a time, as did Franz Marc, with whom he founded the group known as Der Blaue Reiter in Munich in 1911. When the Nazi assault on modern art was at its height, many of these artists would be included in the ‘degenerate art’ exhibition of 1937.

A Street in Murnau, by Vassily Kandinsky, c. 1908, oil on craft board Cubism, created principally by Picasso and Braque in Paris between 1904 and 1911, rejected traditional perspective, modelling, and light and shade, breaking objects into fragments, reducing forms to planes and geometric figures and combining various viewpoints in the same image. It developed its own variants in two phases: Analytical Cubism (1910–12) and Synthetic Cubism (post-1912). Many artists in the Polo Collection went through some kind of Cubist, Cubo- Futurist or Post-Cubist phase, including Man Ray, Karl Schwitters, Paul Joostens, Georges Vantongerloo, Marthe Donas, Gustavs Klucis, Jos Léonard, Karel Maes and Gustav Miklos.

Marthe Donas, Still Life ‘K’, c. 1917–18, oil on canvas

Futurism, launched in Italy in 1909 by the poet Marinetti, came to an end with the start of the First World War in 1914, rejected the past, glorified speed and technology and was later associated with fascism. Some Belgian artists in the Collection – Peeters, Joostens and Van Dooren – were in touch with this style for a time.

Constructivism was a Russian art and architectural movement that took its inspiration from abstract and geometric forms and from industrial and mechanical sources; it began around 1914 but received a decisive boost with the October Revolution of 1917, after which it became the representative style of the new society before being crushed by Stalinism in the 1930s, although the influence of both styles would continue reaching avant-garde circles the world over. The Polo Collection includes works by some of its great exponents: El Lissitzky, Gustavs Klucis, Ivan Kliun and Ilia Chashnik. All four were in touch with Suprematism, a movement created by Malevich in Russia at the same time which was the first art movement based on pure geometric abstraction.

Proun, c. 1920, a constructivist work by El Lissitzky in which the artist uses mixed media on paper

At the start of the 20th century, modern art culminated in Abstraction or non-figurative art with its rejection of objectivity and imitation of nature, along with the gradual transformation of depth – the perspective imposed since the Renaissance – into a flat plane covered in colour and form. The experimentation of all the avant-garde schools achieved its maximum expression in this radical break with traditional art, driven principally by groups active in Germany, Russia, Belgium and the Netherlands. The transition from figurative to abstract art produced a wide range of expression, and this is excellently reflected in the Polo Collection.

Georges Vantongerloo, Function and Variant, 1939, amalgam of pigment and gum arabic on paper

At the same time as Constructivism was developing, in the Netherlands the De Stijl group, founded by Mondrian and other artists in 1917, was using abstraction to explore the laws of balance and harmony with the aim of achieving ‘pure plastic’ expression, later dubbed ‘Neoplasticism’ by Mondrian himself. A number of the artists represented in the Polo Collection were part of this group: Van Doesburgand Vantongerloo were two of its founders; others like Léonard, Karel Maes, Schwitters and Vordemberge-Gildewart joined the movement or came under its influence.

Karel Maes, Untitled, 1922, gouache on paper

The Bauhaus was founded in Germany in 1919. A school of design – the name means ‘building house’ – it was a merger between two existing schools (the Academy of Arts and the School of Arts and Crafts) which, like Constructivism in Russia, sought to improve people’s living conditions through architecture and industrial design, and in the case of the Bauhaus by paying special attention to objects in everyday use and combining theory with practice. Based in Weimar and then in Dessau, it was forced to close when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Many of the most notable artists of the period taught at the Bauhaus; those represented in the Polo Collection include Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer and Lászlo Moholy-Nagy who would go on to found the New Bauhaus in Chicago. The great Constructivist El Lissitzky was the link between the Russians and the innovative art of the West, most notably with De Stilj and the Bauhaus.

Construction, a work by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, a teacher at the Bauhaus, created in 1923, in stainless steel, plexiglass and painted vulcanised fibre The Der Sturm gallery played a key role in the history of modern art as the centre of the avant- garde in Berlin; its founder, Herwarth Walden, first launched a magazine with this name. Until its closure in 1924, Fauvists, members of Der Blaue Reiter, Futurists and all the great artists of the period, from Munch to Picasso, Klee and Delaunay, exhibited at the gallery. Many of the artists in the Polo Collection held shows there, including Schlemmer, Schwitters, Peeters, Flouquet, Donas, Servranckx and Vordemberge-Gildewart.

Work by Marthe Donas, Tango, produced for the cover of the Der Sturm magazine in 1920. Marthe signed her work ‘Tour Donas’, because at that time it was not easy to be accepted as an artist if you were a woman. Dada was a nihilist movement which, from Zurich, spread to parts of Europe and to New York at the start of the 20th century. It rebelled against tradition and the aesthetic criteria of the period and focused instead on the absurd, on provocation and the humorous, although it often contains an underlying note of melancholy. The Belgian artist Paul Joostens was ahead of Schwitters in creating the first collages and Dada objects; Doesburg and Schwitters himself brought this movement to the Netherlands. Another artist in the Polo Collection is Man Ray, who moved from Dadaism to Surrealism, as did Max Ernst, one of the most celebrated of the Surrealists.

Paul Joostens, Dada Object, mixed media assemblage, created around 1918

In the period between the wars, Surrealism made fantasy, the irrational and the subconscious the motif and inspiration of art, using art as a means of promoting investigation into the psychology of the individual. Under the guidance of the French poet André Breton, it attracted the energy of the Dada group and extended and intensified its indulgence of the absurd. A number of artists in the Polo Collection played an important role in this movement: the French painter William Degouve de Nuncques; the German artist Max Ernst – one of the movement’s founders in Paris; the American Man Ray – a Dada artist, filmmaker and photographer; and Belgian artists like the pioneering Marthe Donas and Marc Eemans – the first Belgian Surrealist, ahead of Magritte.

The Belgian artist Marc Eemans was one of the pioneers of Surrealism. The image shows: Lady removing her finery, 1927, oil on canvas.

3. THE HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDES FIND A HOME IN SPAIN

It is a well-known fact that the modern art trends known as the historical avant-gardes have remained very under-represented in Spanish museums – even in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid – and this is especially true of the avant-gardes of Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. In this sense, the Polo Collection fills a chronological gap in the history of art, fostering the rediscovery of many of these artists by the general public and, in a number of cases, actually bringing to light other artists completely unknown except by experts although vitally important and highly influential in their time.

Oskar Schlemmer, Grotesque III, 1923–32, afzelia wood, inlaid and applied ivory, steel rod and two brass nails, height 57 cm This collection of historical avant-garde pieces is representative of a diverse range of trends, both of Informalism, with the beginnings of abstraction, Constructivism and Neoplasticism and a predominance of distinct forms of abstraction and of New Realism (Neorealism, Novecento, Magic Realism, Neo-Cubism, Neo-Expressionism, lyrical figurativism, New Objectivity, Precisionism) – artistic idioms which, together with the different forms of abstraction, dominated the discourse of modernity in the interwar period.

A distinctive contribution to our knowledge of the art of the first half of the 20th century is made by these figures who represent the peripheral avant-gardes – a term used to describe the majority of those avant-garde movements that developed in Europe and the United States outside of the main avant-garde centres like Paris, Milan, Berlin, Dresden, Vienna and Moscow – and today historiography is focusing far more on these lesser-known locations. Along with artists from Belgium and the Netherlands, there are artists from Great Britain, Poland, Switzerland, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Ukraine, Latvia, the United States, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

4. THE RETURN OF FLEMISH ART

The Prado Museum collections were established from royal collections and therefore boast an unparalleled abundance of 15th- and 17th-century Flemish painting. However, as far as later periods are concerned, there is something of a break in the Flemish connection. The Thyssen- Bornemisza Museum provides some continuity with works by important 19th- and 20th-century Dutch and Belgian artists including Van Gogh, Anton Mauve, James Ensor, Piet Mondrian and René Magritte – ensuring that artists associated with revolutionary art movements are well represented. And now, the artworks in the Polo Collection bridge the gap in the Flemish tradition with the avant-gardes of the first decades of the 20th century, including artists like Paul Joostens – who created the first collages and Dada objects ahead of Kurt Schwitters –Jozef Peeters, Georges Vantongerloo, Marthe Donas, Marc Eemans, Pierre-Louis Flouquet, Jos Léonard, Karel Maes and Victor Servranckx – Belgium’s first abstract artists.

Jozef Peeters, Synthesis, 1924, oil on canvas 5. ART OF TODAY

The second part of the Collection covers the period from the end of the Second World War to the present day – to what the American art historian Barbara Rose, who is very familiar with the Polo Collection, calls ‘the new frontiers of experimentation’ – and offers an interesting variety of approaches. The majority of this group of artists began working in the early part of the 1950s and have continued into the 21st century, producing art in a wide range of techniques, formats and idioms. There is an important body of non-figurative works including, notably, those by Werner Mannaers, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Thomas Downing, Xavier Noiret-Thomé, Ed Moses and Walter Darby Bannard. There is also another group that is part of the new figurative art movement: Jan Vanriet, Andrew Tift, Annabelle Hyvrier, Peter Van Gheluwe, Sadie Murdoch and Wladimir Moszowski.

Although it includes many artists from France, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Poland, the majority that make up this part of the Collection are from Belgium, the United States, Spain and Italy and are known today beyond the borders of their respective countries; they are artists with works in the collections of major international museums like Tate Modern in London, MoMA in New York, Yale University Art Gallery and many others; they have also taken part in important international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Biennial.

Walter Darby Bannard, Ivory Parlour II, 1964, alkyd resin on starched cotton canvas 6. PAINTING AND MUCH MORE

Although oil paintings, watercolours and drawings make up the majority of the Collection, there are also some late 19th-century sculptures (Bick, Lacombe and others), collages and assemblages by the avant-garde artists already mentioned (Joostens, Eemans, Ermilov, Van Dooren, etc.) and a striking selection of late 19th-century modernist furniture (Rossetti, Georg Hulbe, Armand Point, Van de Velde, Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, Peeters, Servranckx and others), along with some interesting examples of industrial design.

The Collection also includes more recently developed media such as photography, represented by various photographers of the past and present, including the French photographer Jacques- Henri Lartigue, the Belgian Carl de Keyzer, Deborah Turbeville and Carolyn Marks Blackwood from the United States, and installations by the Dutch artist Maria Roosen.

Red Roosenary by Maria Roosen, blown glass suspended from a 16th-century statue, in the 16th-century convent church designed by Antón Egas, an architect of Flemish extraction